Introduction to the Special Issue

Design-based research is sometimes called a signature approach within the learning sciences. Yet when many of us think of the key developers of the approach, we turn to the American psychologists who—frustrated with the limitations of laboratory psychology experiments for improving educational practice—sought to develop an alternative form of experimentation. This includes figures such as Ann Brown, Allan Collins, Joe Campione, John Bransford, and Roy Pea, to name just a few of these pioneers of the approach. The readers of the Journal of the Learning Sciences will also regularly turn to the special issue of this journal from 2004 (Barab & Squire, 2004) as well as special issues of Educational Researcher (Kelly, 2003) and Educational Psychologist (Sandoval & Bell, 2004) for guidance regarding the various argumentative grammars (Kelly, 2004) that design research follows.

We observe that these publications, considered central by the learning sciences community, leave out an important part of the story of how our field came to its family of interventionist approaches to educational research, particularly its early connection with the approach that has its roots in the work of L. S. Vygotsky, his colleagues, and his students (see Cole & Engeström, 2007, and Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 2010, for descriptions of that approach). The contributors to this issue of the Journal of the Learning Sciences all draw on this tradition in formulating what they refer to as cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) approaches to educational design and research.

An early and influential account of the Soviet approach to what is now referred to as design experimentation was Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) influential volume on the role of context in development. Somehow not taken up from Bronfenbrenner’s monograph was its subtitle: Experiments by Nature and Design. When he first wrote about experimentation based on design, Bronfenbrenner took as his model a Vygotskian-inspired mode of designing development-enhancing practices referred to as transformative experiments. He described his views on this form of design experimentation as follows: “Soviet psychologists often speak of what they call the ‘transforming experiment.’ By this they mean an experiment that radically restructures the environment, producing a new configuration that activates previously unrealized behavioral potentials of the subject” (p. 40).

Examples of such design experimentation included the work of Davydov (1988), which involved the design of mathematics activities implemented in elementary school classrooms; the Elkonin–Zaporozhets preschool curriculum (Zaporozhets & Elkonin, 1971); and Meshcheryakov’s (1979) experimental boarding school for the deaf-blind.

Ann Brown did not reference Bronfenbrenner, but she did draw on Vygotsky in her seminal paper on design experimentation (Brown, 1992). In particular, Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of a zone of proximal development is introduced as a basic principle in her design efforts. There, it appears in her principle of organizing instruction so that learning can lead development—or, as Brown (1992) expressed it, “One should go beyond the current level of competence, stretch the limits, and take children to the upper boundaries of their potentiality” (p. 168). In their work, Brown and her colleagues successfully created classroom communities that expanded the capabilities of children that schools had labeled as learning disabled to engage in complex reading comprehension activities (e.g., Brown & Palincsar, 1982).

At the same time that Brown and Campione were working out the set of ideas that would produce the Fostering Communities of Learners project (Brown & Campione, 1994), they were also participating in a hastily cobbled together design experiment conducted at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition. In this case, it was a variety of activities that could serve as curriculum units for the teaching of reading (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1982). This project had as one of its products the decades-long experiment called The Fifth Dimension (Cole & The Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006). Ann Brown was the first name on the list of Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition contributors to the joint project and publication.¹

In the mid-1980s an important addition to a growing collective of people who were finding it useful to combine the ideas of Vygotsky, Leontiev, and Luria in the design of development-enhancing activities was Yrjo Engeström, whose work represents perhaps the most visible program of contemporary intervention research. Engeström brought Vygotsky and Leontiev together (despite cardinal disagreements between the two men) in a manner that provided a systematic way to study the process of self-guided, deliberate change, a process he and his colleagues called expansive learning (see Engeström, 1987, 2011; Engeström & Sannino, 2010).

For several years, interactions among these groups intensified. Engeström spent more than a decade commuting between Helsinki and La Jolla, California. Until Ann’s untimely death, and subsequently the end of the project, interactions between La Jolla and Berkeley were ongoing. In reflecting on these interactions, Cole (2007) observed that they were engaged in a common task with slightly different aims and within somewhat different contexts, namely, “creating a methodology that is adequate to the social science study of educational innovations … and to study the processes by which such innovations can be disseminated and sustained” (p. 78).

These different lines of work have diffused globally over a period of decades. Early on, mathematics education researchers in both the United States and Holland began to adapt Davydov’s approach, now referred to as a teaching experiment, as a way to develop and test conjectures about how to support the learning of particular mathematical concepts in real classrooms (Steffe & Thompson, 2000). These studies had a significant influence on some learning sciences scholars, who used the term teaching experiment when describing their design research studies (e.g., Cobb, McClain, & Gravemeijer, 2003; Lamberg & Middleton, 2009).

Today, learning sciences researchers are increasingly drawing on the writings of key early figures in the cultural-historical tradition (e.g., Ellis, 2007; Hall & Nemirovsky, 2012; Pea, 2004; Schliemann, 2002) as well as contemporary, third-generation activity theorists such as Engeström (e.g., Danish, 2014; Yamagata-Lynch, 2007). Thus far, however, with the exception of Yamagata-Lynch’s (2007) and Danish’s (2014) Journal of the Learning Sciences articles, there has been little attention to the interventionist aspects of this tradition in the pages of this journal, specifically with regard to how they might inform design-based research in the learning sciences. This special issue attempts to address this gap with a set of articles that are intended to both present expanded conceptualizations of design-based research and illustrate their application in practice.

CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL-HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO INTERVENTION: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

As noted previously, CHAT refers to an interdisciplinary approach to studying human learning and development associated with the names of the Soviet psychologists L. S. Vygotsky, A. R. Luria, and A. N. Leontiev. There has been a lively debate in recent years about the extent to which these three thinkers represent a single theoretical perspective. According to one line of interpretation, those who follow Vygotsky have focused attention on processes of mediation of human activity by tools and signs, adopting mediated action in context as a basic unit of analysis (Wertsch, del Rio, & Alvarez, 1995). This line of work is often referred to as sociocultural research. By contrast, followers of Leontiev are said to choose activity as a basic unit of analysis (Kaptelinin, 1996). One characteristic of CHAT-based research is that it seeks to give equal emphasis to mediation and activity, although any given piece of research may emphasize one or another aspect of the complicated process of change. For our purposes in this special issue these distinctions are not central, and we treat the differing formulations as expressions of a single family of theoretical commitments. The following are some theoretical principles of this family.

CHAT approaches, taken as a whole, emphasize the cultural and institutional organization of human action in various forms, in a wide variety of social settings ranging from classrooms in schools to community settings and workplaces. Regardless of their focus, they assume the situatedness of human action, the centrality of cultural mediation, the need to take seriously the study of the history of the process under study, and a focus on social dynamics within changing institutions and communities.

Common to these approaches is also a concern with praxis, or practical human activity to transform the world. Vygotsky and his collaborators engaged in clinical and educational endeavors directed at improving the conditions of young children, children with disabilities, and adults who had suffered from brain injury. More recently, researchers have made use of cultural-historical theories to organize and analyze educational settings in schools, informal learning environments, families, and workplaces (e.g., Engeström, 1999; Engeström, Engeström, & Suntio, 2002; Goldman & Booker, 2009; Matusov, 2011); to reveal and analyze the cognitive demands of work often judged to require limited knowledge (e.g., Beach, 1995); to design sociotechnical systems (e.g., Kuutti, 1999); to study knowledge production and change in organizations and in processes of professional development (Engeström et al., 2002); and to guide radical forms of psychotherapy (e.g., Newman, 2003). The sheer breadth of these contexts is one way that cultural-historical interventions may be distinguished from much of learning sciences research, which has mainly focused on investigating disciplinary learning in schools.

Furthermore, in CHAT approaches to intervention research, designs are completed not ahead of time but in practice, and participants have an important hand in shaping them. For example, in Engeström and colleagues’ change laboratories, researchers act primarily as facilitators of participants’ own analysis of contradictions in their activity systems and of envisioning new possibilities for engaging with them (Engeström, Virkkunen, Helle, Pihlaja, & Poikela, 1996). Other scholars working within long-term partnerships with organizations think of designing and sustaining interventions as fundamentally a process of mutual appropriation in which the partners attend carefully to one another’s efforts to seed, shape, and mangle features of interventions (Downing-Wilson, Lecusay, & Cole, 2011). In contrast to traditional research, such mutual shaping is not viewed negatively (i.e., as a “lethal mutation,” Brown & Campione, 1996, p. 291) but as an indicator of reciprocity and a healthy partnership. Still others have sought to integrate a concern with attention to the institutional and organizational contexts of design research, engaging in collaborative design with both teachers and leaders in school districts to create conditions for sustainable improvements to teaching and learning (Penuel, 2014; Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011).

A related contribution of CHAT approaches to intervention research has been their attention to human diversity as a resource for design. A number of scholars have sought to examine specifically how particular cultural forms of expression and repertoires for participation in the cultural practices of communities can be integrated into classroom teaching (e.g., Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez, & Tejada, 2000; Lee, 2001). Still others have sought to identify funds of knowledge that can be identified in communities and then brought to bear on disciplinary learning (e.g., Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992).

THE ARTICLES IN THE SPECIAL ISSUE

As we elaborate below, each of the articles in this special issue takes up some aspect of cultural-historical intervention research briefly summarized above. They each draw on traditions that are outside of what learning sciences research has typically used to inform design research.

O’Neill’s contribution (2016/this issue) aims to provide a bridge between the perspective of a design researcher whose approach to design-based research has taken primary inspiration from Brown, Collins, and others in the learning sciences tradition and the authors whose work makes up the bulk of this issue. Partly because his own team’s design research has primarily been carried out in the domain of history, O’Neill became discontented with the dominant practice and conception of design-based research in the learning sciences tradition (O’Neill, 2012, 2016). Inspired by the contributors’ CHAT-driven work, he questions what sense it ever made to claim that a learning environment can be engineered and how helpful it is to expect that a design be refined in one context to be transplanted to a very different (if equally real) one. While lauding the longstanding partnerships discussed in the articles that follow and the long time spans encompassed in the research, he poses four pointed questions for our contributors that others in the learning sciences community should find helpful in assessing the unique value that the CHAT approach may bring to design-based research.

Cole and Packer’s contribution (2016/this issue) links the ideas of design and learning to Herbert Simon’s well-known conception of the artificial. The authors explore the implications of conceiving of contemporary design research as a science of the doubly artificial. Following in the Vygotskian tradition, they point out that among humans, processes of learning are not natural properties of humans but culturally mediated, socially constructed, and materially embodied in designed human activities. Classrooms are not natural settings for education but culturally-historically evolved artificial systems and hence need to be studied in those terms. The artificial nature of classrooms is all too easy to treat as unchanging because it has changed very slowly in the course of many millennia. Cole and Packer illustrate an experiment conducted in a youth club for elementary and middle school children as a means of studying the history of an artificial activity in an artificial system and of tracing the designed activity with respect to its institutional setting over eventful periods of time. They argue that their mesogenetic method enables the design researcher to observe and document the dynamics of the activity’s internal functioning in relation to events occurring in the larger ecology.

The article by Severance, Penuel, Sumner, and Leary (2016/this issue) takes up the question of what happens in design research when expanding the agency of teachers in curriculum design is taken as an object of the designed activity. Although in much research involving curriculum design the process is driven by researchers’ goals, in the research–practice partnership these authors discuss teachers play a significant role in shaping both the content of the curriculum and the design process. Their analysis shows how CHAT can be useful in assessing the efficacy of the design process in accomplishing their aim of expanding teacher agency.

The article by Gutiérrez and Jurow (2016/this issue) presents two examples of social design experiments, a form of CHAT-inspired design-based research that foregrounds both equity and history. The authors highlight the need for explicit attention to equity in design-based research and argue that foregrounding equity demands attention to historicity. By this they mean that participants in an intervention are historical actors whose actions both are situated within and seek to transform existing social relations. Their examples highlight ways in which design research can be an activist endeavor, focused on joining efforts to transform the social futures of nondominant communities.

The article by Sannino, Engeström, and Lemos (2016/this issue) illustrates ways in which cultural-historical approaches to design research can support transformative agency, that is, the breaking away from current patterns of activity to new forms that are more productive. The authors present three examples of a cycle of transformative agency, the first of which is a kind of intravention, illustrating the ways in which communities can bring about new and better forms of collective activity on their own, without the support of external partners. They follow this with two examples illustrating the ways in which researchers acting as facilitators can help participants engage in a critical analysis of their current activity systems and take steps toward developing new forms of collaborative activity. This strategy puts into sharp focus the question of what value design researchers add to the potentials already present in a group.

Finally, Greeno’s commentary (2016/this issue) locates this set of articles sympathetically within Stokes’s (1997) Pasteur’s quadrant, that is, basic but use-inspired research on learning. Greeno proposes that the articles in this collection develop understanding, technology, and practices that are applicable to activity systems, not just classrooms within schools that are sites of much design-based research. Greeno also proposes that CHAT approaches to design-based research further clarify and develop some key concepts developed in the articles, including the method of double stimulation and transformational agency.

Our fond hope is that this special issue will help to reconnect two strands of design experimentation that have grown apart, enabling mutual appropriation—a mangling of the aims and practices of design-based research in ways that advance our understanding of how and what we learn when we work with others to develop and test educational innovations.

Notes

¹ See http://lchc.ucsd.edu/Histarch/jl82v4n3.PDF#page=1.